the Hubris Games continue

The circus of pompous lunacy continues. I have other things to do, but I find myself writing on this again, as the noise of what we have for news now here in the US fills people’s heads with the assortment of simplistic cliches, confusion, misinformation, and distribution of deceptions that most of us like to refer to as bullshit.

It has occurred to me that somebody who might actually bother reading here might read some of the recent notes, regarding the big drama, could possibly get some notion in their head like “so, what, then, you’re taking Putin’s side, taking Russia’s side?”. Oh hell no.

Offers of “aid” from the US government to the Ukrainian government seem to be in play now, while the reality that doesn’t quite come across in all the theater of we care a lot about the Ukrainian people from the political actors is that this basically amounts to offering the opportunity to become in debt to the US government, European and US banking systems, and, by the way, have “intensified relations” with NATO. From there, it’s just a matter of time before the NATO base goes into Ukraine, which will effectively mean a US military base in Ukraine, right at Russia’s edge. We would be able to count on some billions of dollars more spent on that, as “defense”.

The question of what our government here in the US might have been up to, in meddling in Ukraine, trying to coax, prod, and provoke “regime change”, until the the neocon cult dominating our government gets a government in another nation that they can control, seems to be an unanswered question here in the news media that substitutes for a free press. For that matter, it’s a question that seems to remain unasked in all the “news” showbiz chatter about The Ukrainian Crisis.

That should get people’s attention, and by that I’m not just talking about the question of what sort of manipulative meddling the US government might have been doing, but the lack of attention given to examining this. Raising this kind of thing is likely to be tossed aside as “conspiracy theory stuff”, a euphemistic way of dismissing things as some irrational or deluded crackpot paranoia, even though it should be apparent from decades of events that our government has had quite a history of this kind of ugliness. Some of it has been more or less in plain sight (like the “liberation” of Iraq), some of it stuff that was more secret and covert, and then revealed later on as reality wins out, like the infamous “Iran-Contra” horror show during the Raegan administration. Go back some years, not such a long time ago, and review the enthusiastic US government support of Osama bin Laden and his band of goons operating in Afghanistan, regarding them as “freedom fighters”, or the buddy-buddy relationship with Saddam Hussein, presented as friend and ally of the US, because, you know, he was the enemy of those terrible threatening Iranians (the same one Reagan sold weapons).

In any case, whatever the hell the US government has been up to trying to, shall we say, stir up some shit in Ukraine to get a “US/EU friendly” government there, a little neocon “regime change”, it’s becoming more apparent that the consequences and repercussions of actual reality are turning out to be very complex and ugly, even while a parade of political creatures in the US project a PR show about “supporting the Ukranian people in their desire for freedom and democracy” and all that jazz.

What is happening is obviously complex and confused. There are evidently people who were genuinely fed up with what appears to have been a wretched lousy corrupt government, and protesting, there are the bunch from some sort of lingering cultural residue of hardcore Ukranian nationalism with a severe neo-Nazi character a few generations on from people there who actually synpathized with Nazi Germany during World War II and even supported them fighting against the Soviet Union (while Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union), there are people elsewhere who want to be associated with Russia, many of them simply considering themselves as Russian, especially in the Crimea region, which was actually part of Russia until Nikita Khrushchev made the region a part of Ukraine (while Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, so I really don’t know what the point was, but that’s a side item). It’s ugly, confused, and seems to be more a case of chaotic mob rule more than a nation with a functioning government, “interim” or otherwise.

Then, of course, there’s the added complication of the Russian navy, maintaining a base in the Crimea region of Ukraine on the coast of the Black Sea, a remnant of the Soviet days, under a long term lease agreement with Ukraine that reportedly allows them to have 25000 troops there for security of the base. There will probably be argument about how many are there, but I find it noteworthy that in all the political barking, dutifully relayed by the news media, about “Russian aggression”, nobody seems to mention anything about the Russians being allowed to have military there, and considering the chaos, it does not seem awfully unreasonable for Putin and the Russians to move armed forces in there.

There can probably be all kinds of arguments about the specifics of what’s happening in that area, and Putin’s intentions, but it certainly shows no evidence of what some people want us all to think, as they bang the war drums, that Putin just decided one day to roll an invasion into Ukraine and take over in some 21st century Russian blitzkreig.

It’s all messy and unclear and grim. It’s probably worth some reflection about how US neocon ambitions of “regime change” in Ukraine might have a similar aroma to what happened surrounding “regime change” and “the liberation of Iraq”, and how the results and repercussions there, after “victory” and “liberation”, turned out to be one hell of a complex mess, while the whole neocon brigade seemed utterly baffled, or in pure denial, about what a hellish and out of control mess resulted. It’s been an epic demonstration of unexpected results from the meddling of megalomaniacs.

You might recall a real classic scene from one of the press conferences presented by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield (one of the Project for the New American Century club) in the days following “mission accomplished” military victory in Iraq, when the occupation following the “liberation” of Iraq was proving itself beyond any doubt to be a complete clusterfuck, that the US neocons had managed to take a nation where things were bad and make them worse. Asked about all that, Rumsfield came back with a comment that sticks in memory, one that will go into the history books, I suspect, that “freedom is messy”. That was his explanation. “Freedom is messy.”

The same bunch of psychopaths have been hammering the war drums for years just itching to start a war with Iran, even though, despite a long period of belligerent lunatics in the government there, there doesn’t seem to be any indication of some sort of “national security ” threat to us. But, then, in the neocon mentality, anything, anybody, anywhere not under their control and domination is presented with various histrionics as “a threat to America’s national security”.

Watching the Ukraine drama, it’s hard to shake the impression that, in all the irrational chatter flying around, there are people here in the US thinking and acting as if the present day Russian Federation still is the Soviet Union, and, for that matter, think it’s still a communist government.

All through this, still (unsurprising), Obama and Kerry pose and make ridiculous pronouncements and declarations that basically just continue to toe the neocon party line, and we continue to have the same sort of problems of Americans being unable to get Obama as president in any proper realistic perspective, whether it’s the people who have been sputtering nonsense since before his inauguration, or the people lining up as the “other side” to that and hanging on to images and notions of what they want to believe Obama is as president. The very same political characters who have been barking about this supposed tyrant dictator Obama turn around and, now, suddenly, according to them Obama is feckless, weak, an ineffective leader, because he’s just not good enough at being ruler of the world.

Just yesterday I had a chance to sit down and watch the movie The World’s End (which is great, by the way). I won’t give away any of the story, but near the end of the movie, there’s a great line from one of the main characters shouting about we humans “we’re more belligerent, more stubborn, and more idiotic than you could ever imagine!“.

Unfortunately, we have too many people determined to prove that, and many of them gravitate to positions of power and influence and control.